BRATTLEBORO — Havana seems haunted by the past.
The island itself was first visited by Columbus in the same year that Gutenberg printed the Bible. Within less than a century, the native Taino people had been decimated by disease and warfare.
The earliest buildings and forts in Havana date from the 1500s. The long history of slavery only ended in 1888, and it was not until after Fidel Castro took power that the Jim Crow laws were abolished, about the same time as in the United States.
In old Havana, the layers of architecture span the colonial past and two revolutions. Squat, blocky Soviet-era buildings sit alongside colonial villas. On the main avenues and in the hotels there are shops where one can search out Western perfumes. A Puma store sits next to one selling Adidas.
In the long narrow side streets, the windows are hung with drying towels and garments, a colorful array; and small holes-in-the-wall offer dim mysteries that we are hesitant to try, speaking as little Spanish as we do.
A fruit vendor has his stall in a vacant lot, and we buy oranges using the convertible currency that matches the dollar one-to-one, receiving our change in pesos that go 25 to the dollar.
My wife Shanta wants to photograph him, but he insists that I be in the picture, too - not what she had intended, since the alley-way behind her attracts her vision. He is a beautiful boy, shirtless, his dark skin gleaming in afternoon sunlight above the mixed hues of orange and yellow of the fruit he purveys.
We put our arms around each other's shoulders, and she snaps the shot. Later, she goes back to get her original photo.
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The 1950s American cars that fill the streets are a cliché by now - I can remember Newsweek running a story about them in the 1980s.
Some cars, we are told, are mainly Russian in their mechanical workings after six decades of tinkering - it is only the exterior that looks like a 1955 Plymouth convertible, one of those broad-finned boat-like cars that evoke the Cold War and Buddy Holly in a glance.
They are miracles of the mechanics, and I wonder whether one of the Santería saints invoked by rhumba in the Callejón de Hamel ought to represent those who keep them running with their tools and the old parts harvested from cars that are past recovery. A good mechanic makes more than a doctor here.
We are living in Vedado, the new part of Havana that was built up by the Mafia after World War II. The story goes that in 1946 Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky held a conclave of the North American Mafia families at the Hotel Nacional, a place modeled after the Breakers in Miami, under the guise that they all were attending a Frank Sinatra concert.
In the 1950s, the cars on the streets were still new, and the casinos were in full operation. Fulgencio Batista, at the time the U.S.-backed dictator, and his gang skimmed from the American money pouring into the city, while Fidel Castro bided his time in a prison in Isla de la Juventud, which we will visit next week so Shanta can take pictures.
In 1955, Batista declared a prison amnesty, releasing Fidel, perhaps to curry favor with a growing opposition, perhaps so he could assassinate Castro once he was free.
Castro fled to Mexico to avoid any attempt, but then returned in 1956. At one point, only 12 rebels remained in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Castro slept with a loaded gun against his neck, safety off, so he would not be taken alive.
This is all guidebook history. By Jan. 1, 1959, Batista had fled, and Castro was in charge.
If there are ghosts of that time of the American ascendance, they are hard to discern amongst so many other ghosts. The buildings are all still here, run now by the government, or sometimes in ruins. The Trump edict said we can't spend our money in government places - we should go to Las Vegas instead, or maybe Mar-a-Lago.
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Something about the deep past of Havana makes me simultaneously sad and sentimental, and also deeply sense irony. A young friend here said to us that all Cubans are both angry and happy. Perhaps that is what Americans should be as well.
The politics of the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s are mad and tragic. I taught them in a course last semester, and it is impossible not to think of them here - if nothing else, one cannot think of the assassination of John F. Kennedy without thinking of Cuban exiles, the Mafia, and the CIA, or what forces allowed Jack Ruby to worm his way into the Dallas jail and kill Lee Harvey Oswald.
In Milan Kundera's wonderful novelistic essay about the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he tells a joke. A man is in the middle of a main square in Prague, throwing up violently - perhaps he has had too much to drink. Another man comes over to him, maybe a cabdriver or a mechanic. He puts his arm on the sick man's shoulder and says “I know just what you mean.”
That's the United States today. For the first time in two weeks I make the mistake of reading the news in a brief stint on the internet, and it is like reading a novel where one knows the ending despite having skipped a few chapters.
One wonders how the year 2018 will go down in U.S. history. It won't be pretty.
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From this vantage point, it is hard not to think sometimes of just cashing in our chips and moving here, maybe open a little café, serve some pasta and rum.
Things are clear here - the modes of expression that are permitted (musical, artistic) and those that are not. Life is hard and also easy, and Spanish is not the most difficult language to acquire.
Pero estamos Nuevo Yorkino y Hartfordera, y Vermonteros tambien, and our fate will be to return to the states in a couple of weeks and see where we are. Our time here is halfway through as I write, and the dawn sky is nearly as gray as the grey sea.
The wind howls outside our building, and white spray leaps up against the seawall of the Malecón. Today, we will visit the Museum of the Revolution in La Habana Vieja, listen to some jazz or salsa, and talk to the ghosts some more.